


Eight Legged Freaks

by Pollydoodles



Series: The Pizza Dog Chronicles [15]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 02:15:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7080541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollydoodles/pseuds/Pollydoodles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve has a late-night issue. Bucky's happy to go along for the ride. Darcy wishes she were still asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Legged Freaks

Darcy awoke to the uncomfortable feeling of being watched. 

Groggily, she raised her head and wriggled, enjoying the ‘tween time of not being asleep yet not being quite fully awake yet. Bucky’s arm, slung across her waist, was a comforting weight that pushed her down into the mattress. Blinking, she remembered that he’d slunk in beside her again, which meant that Lucky was almost certainly collapsed across the bottom of the bed. Reaching out with bare toes, she could feel soft fur against them, which in time was joined by the tell-tale thump of his tail as he wagged it lazily, half in dreams himself. 

The two main culprits accounted for, it really left just the one suspect.

She cracked an eye open and found Steve staring back down at her from the side of the bed. Groaning, Darcy rolled her head back on the pillow and rubbed at one eye with her hand, trying to limit her movements so as not to disturb Bucky. 

“S’up, Rogers?”

“Darcy, I need your help,” He answered urgently, and with that, despite his whisper, Bucky was awake and sat up by the side of her. Darcy bounced slightly as his weight shifted and, groaning again, she pushed herself into a semblance of being upright. Bucky slipped an arm behind her back, supporting her without thinking, and she leaned into his chest gratefully whilst readjusting her focus on Steve.

He was in the suit, which usually meant that he’d arrived back from some mission or other, which was what tended to find him hovering at her bedside in the dead of the night after tracking down his best friend. Bucky was spending more and more time with Darcy, especially now at night; she’d first found him slinking into her bedroom at gone midnight when he’d awoken from a nightmare and been unable to find Steve, but now it seemed that he just turned up whenever he felt like it. 

She wasn’t complaining. 

This time, however, Steve’s suit looked suspiciously clean. No blood, no tears, no substances of alien origins - which was always a bonus, Darcy thought to herself. Oftentimes Steve ended up crawling into bed with them as well, too tired or too wired to find comfort on his own. Darcy put up with the tumbled mass of too large bodies and too much heat because she was bright enough to see that Steve, for all his day to day calm confidence and unruffled nature, sometimes needed a warm hand in the night just as much as Bucky did. 

That said, she would have preferred it if he was tracking slightly less goop and guts into her bed when he fell into it. 

“There’s a situation.” He followed up, blue eyes serious. She realised then that he also had the shield slung across his back, hands resting on his utility belt and everything about his posture ready for action. She scrambled upward, using Bucky as leverage, and fought to keep the rising panic out of her voice as she answered him.

“What’s happening, Steve? Are we- is the tower under attack?” Darcy managed what she considered a superhuman effort at keeping her tone level and calm, but the dark-haired man beside her knew her far too well to keep much from him. She felt him shift behind her and then a strong hand was against her hip, his head resting on her shoulder as they both gazed up at the soldier in front of them. 

“No, no, nothing like that...” He looked faintly embarrassed as he trailed off. 

“Well, what then?” Darcy asked in confusion, her head tilting to one side as she ran through several possible scenarios in her head. Alien invasions, terrorist attacks, escaped zoo animals… “Come on Steve.”

He cleared his throat. “There’s, um. There’s a spider.”

Darcy blinked. 

“Sorry, could you just-”

“I don’t like them, alright?” He burst out, a deep flush of red colouring across his cheeks as he interrupted her. “They’re all hairy, and creepy, and they scuttle off too quick when you spot ‘em-”

“Too many legs.” Bucky agreed sagely from behind her, hand still on her hip but resting there now rather than clasping at her as he had been before. Darcy threaded her fingers into his absentmindedly, feeling him squeeze back softly as she looked up at Steve, whose chest was heaving slightly following his outburst. 

“So you…” She gestured towards his body, running her eyes from head to toe as she did so. “Suited up?”

Steve closed his eyes briefly, and bit at his lower lip before answering. “It covers from wrist to ankle, and then there’s the gloves and the boots. So they can’t. You know.” He nodded at Darcy willing her to follow his train of thought. She shook her head, still stuck on the thought that Captain America, who got his kicks from jumping out of planes without safety gear, couldn’t deal with a common or garden house spider without reaching for his suit. 

“So they can’t touch me.” He finished quickly, dropping his eyes to the floor. 

“Smart.” Bucky commented, nodding his head. 

Darcy turned her head to look over her shoulder at the man sat behind her, and crooked an eyebrow at him. He shrugged, and reached for the dog who, finding everyone up and awake, had crawled up the bed into Bucky’s open legs in delight. Bucky pulled at the dog’s ears gently and earned himself an excited and slobbery lick from wrist to elbow. Darcy, wincing at the drool splattering against her duvet and the fact that Bucky quietly wiped his wet arm against his pillow, chose to turn her attention back to Steve. 

“Right.” She said flatly. “And the shield?” 

That, he could not answer. 

“You know regular people just get a glass and a postcard, right?”

Steve poured his full heart and soul into the look he gave her then. Darcy tried to ignore it, tried her hardest to remember how tired she was and how much she’d been enjoying her sleep. People thought that Steve’s so-called ‘Captain America’ look - the one that said, without a single word that he wasn’t angry, just disappointed - was the worst thing in his arsenal but they’d clearly never been subject to his puppy-dog eyes. 

Darcy glanced over at the radio blinking sleepily on her bedside table, and grimaced as she realised it was two in the morning. Sighing, she extricated herself from Bucky and pushed the covers back, shivering slightly as the cool night air hit her bare legs. She slipped off the bed and straightened up in front of Steve with a yawn, stretching her arms up above her head. 

“Where is it, then?”

The solemn procession made its way through the tower towards Steve’s apartment; Steve in his suit and shield on his back, a yawning Darcy in bare feet, shorts and a mismatched t-shirt that had once belonged to Bucky, he trailing along after them both in one of Steve’s old shirts and a loose pair of sweatpants and finally, padding along behind with his nose bumping into the back of Bucky’s knees every two paces, the dog. 

Steve, reaching the door of his apartment, paused with it half open and turned back with a panicked look across his face. Darcy raised an eyebrow at him and gestured for him to spit it out, covering her mouth as she did so with the back of her hand. Bucky rested his chin on the top of her head and put his arms comfortably around her waist as Lucky leaned his not inconsiderable furry bulk into her bare legs and nearly knocked her off balance. 

“What if it’s gone?” Steve hissed, the noise loud in the quiet of the morning. 

Darcy furrowed her brow at him in puzzlement, not following his line of thought. “Then it’s job done and we can go to bed like normal people?” She said, confused by the question. 

Steve shook his head mutely and shut the door quickly. “No, no, no,” He repeated, half under his breath. “You don’t - no.” Darcy stepped back and into Bucky, who tightened his grip on her instantly before releasing his hold again. Steve tapped his fingers across the door, thrumming them against the solid wood as if he were trying to calm himself. 

“Steve?” Darcy asked, laying a hand against his arm. He took a deep breath. 

“If it’s gone… If it’s gone, then it could be anywhere.” The big blond explained, anxious eyes flickering between her and the door, as though at any moment it might be opened by one of eight legs on the other side. “Anywhere, Darce. It could be in my bed.” This last he delivered in a stage whisper, eyes widening. 

“Well, where was it before you left?” 

“Kitchen sink.” 

Darcy snorted. “What, was it doing the dishes?” Steve looked a little hurt at that, and she rubbed his arm in a consolatory fashion to make up for it. “Okay. You want me to go first?” She asked, guessing the answer before it came in the form of an enthusiastic nod. Fighting back another yawn, and pondering what her life would be like without super soldiers in it, she pushed open the door. 

“Wait-” Steve pulled it shut again. 

“Steve-” She started to protest, and was cut short when he thrust the shield at her. Surprised, she wrapped both hands around it and held it to her chest. Confused, not for the first time since Steve had appeared in her bedroom, Darcy looked down at it slowly and then back up at him. She met a pair of serious blue eyes set in a tense face.

Darcy sighed. “Anything else?” Steve shook his head. She pushed open the door again, and made her way, with some difficulty lugging the shield, into the apartment. One might think that Steve Rogers, an old-fashioned man in so many ways and indeed a veteran of the Armed Forces, would keep a sharply clean and tidy living space. That person would be wrong. Steve was as deliberately untidy as any modern man, and in some cases possibly even more so. 

She wandered past his kitchen table that had piles of clothes strewn across it, unclear whether they were clean or dirty and uninterested in finding out either way. She stepped over motorcycle magazines discarded on the floor, and swerved around half a dismantled AK-47 which she assumed had something to do with Bucky. Finally reaching the little kitchenette, she shouldered the shield awkwardly onto one side, her arm just about reaching across it and fingertips desperately curling with difficulty at its edge, and flicked the cabinet lights on. 

The kitchen jerked into a low light, and Darcy blinked slowly, letting her eyes adjust to it. Hearing a noise from behind her, she jerked her head back and found Steve and Bucky both hanging into the room by the door frame, the both of them barely fitting into the space. Steve wore a look of deep concern, Bucky one of not total understanding. Lucky pushed at their legs, desperate to get past but not quite finding enough space to squeeze through. He whined and licked a long stripe up Steve’s suit in protest. Bucky’s right hand dangled and found the back of his head, petting lightly. 

Rolling her eyes, Darcy turned back to the task at hand.

Casting her gaze over the towering set of dirty plates in the sink, which extended across the countertop and beyond - and resisting the urge to cluck her tongue at it - Darcy peered into the sink. How the hell Steve could spot anything in all that mess was beyond her, let alone a spider. She hefted the shield off her arm and laid it carefully against the kitchen cabinet. Behind her she could hear a sharp intake of breath from the soldier, as she discarded it, along with what sounded an awful lot like a soft ‘no’ mumbled into his chest, and shook her head. 

“Look, Steve, buddy - hate to break it to you but I think this guy is long gon- oh.” Darcy stuck her head in further as she realised what she’d mistaken for a grease spot actually had legs. She put a finger out towards it, laying the pad of her finger against the plate and grimacing slightly as she wondered how long it had been in there and quite what was apparently now welded onto it. The spider, pausing in its slow scuttle - probably, Darcy thought, slowed by the spider-equivalent of a post apocalyptic landscape - turned back towards her finger and climbed aboard. 

Rotating on her heels back to the door, she held it aloft in triumph. Steve turned an interesting shade of green and gripped the door frame more firmly. 

“Steve, it’s smaller than Tony’s tax bill.” Darcy snorted, earning a laugh from Bucky that she knew was purely because she was also giggling, because she was mostly certain he didn’t know or care what a tax bill was. “What do you want me to do with it, anyway?”

The soldier waved his hand in the direction of the window, and chanced to step a little further into the room now that the threat had been located and neutralised. Lucky, spotting a window and taking it, bundled his way through between the legs in the doorway and bounded towards Darcy. Tongue lolling and ears flapping, he bounced upwards, paws practically on Darcy’s shoulders and slurped over her hand. 

“Oh.” Darcy yelped, looking down in dismay. 

“What?” Snapped Steve, instantly back on high alert. 

“Lucky.” Darcy said, starting to laugh again. “He’s just eaten the damn spider.”


End file.
